New World leadership

Liz Wilson, COO at Karmarama, demonstrates that when you can’t be an expert in everything you oversee, you’d better be an expert leading and managing teams.

Leadership and what it means has never been more discussed since the Donald won the nomination and subsequently became the Leader of the Free World. The command and control car crashes just keep coming, and sometimes it seems the only upside is that it offers a constant stream of memorable insights and lessons for the rest of us.It’s easier to lead and manage our teams at work than an entire country (mostly!) but it’s at least as important to get it right; a leader sets the tone for the happiness and effectiveness of their own working life as well as their team’s.

That’s always been true but a world of constant, fast, unpredictable change and a world where we’re frequently pushing into new technologies and uncharted waters creates some entirely new demands. It’s a landscape of many unknowns, huge variety, frequent ambiguity and endless complexity. You can’t know all the answers, only the important questions to help you navigate. And when you’re leading and managing a team through a series of opportunities, challenges, disciplines and channels so diverse that you can’t be an expert in all of them, you’d better be an expert in leading and managing teams.

People are often referred to as natural born leaders, as if leadership is a genetic gift not a muscle to be trained; most of the skills that make the difference between good and great leadership are consciously learned, practised and honed over time. They start from a very human place of the experience we want to create for ourselves and our teams, and the type of leader we want to be.

Being clear about all of this can be tough when most of us race from the start to end of the day at breakneck speed with minimal thinking time. And yet developing the team vision and narrative is more important than ever before - to inspire, to motivate and to provide a framework for the team culture and behaviours that directly influence the team’s success. Finding this out can take years of self-reflection but can be accelerated dramatically with the kick start of the right stimulus, like some training or coaching.

With this in mind, the IPA has developed a one day course for aspiring leaders including personal coaching and leading industry speakers on a range of subjects including developing an effective personal leadership style and getting more out of your team, together with a panel to ask those really difficult questions you don’t want to ask in the office. From the personal to the professional to the practical this is a day that could start a whole new leadership journey for you. It’s an honour to be in the chair with such an illustrious and inspiring cast of speakers for us all to learn from, so if you manage a team now or would like to one day, I hope to see you there too on 30th March. Please click here for further information and to book.